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Paradoxically cast as material and imaginary; utopic and dystopic; militarized and peaceful; masculine and feminine; and white, brown, and Other, Latinos hold long-standing concerns regarding borders and their representations and possibilities. Indeed the term “borderlands” offers the promise of disrupting stagnating debates on identity. It likewise holds the pitfalls of becoming subject to appropriation sans the anchor of long-standing identity politics. Indeed, these tensions infuse competing approaches to the border, those who take the materiality of the international boundary between the...

Paradoxically cast as material and imaginary; utopic and dystopic; militarized and peaceful; masculine and feminine; and white, brown, and Other, Latinos hold long-standing concerns regarding borders and their representations and possibilities. Indeed the term “borderlands” offers the promise of disrupting stagnating debates on identity. It likewise holds the pitfalls of becoming subject to appropriation sans the anchor of long-standing identity politics. Indeed, these tensions infuse competing approaches to the border, those who take the materiality of the international boundary between the United States and Mexico as a point of departure versus those who take borders in all their permutations as instigating new mediations of difference and broad new cultural imaginaries. Feminists, critical race scholars, Chicano and Latino scholars, and scholars vested in questions of decoloniality have used metaphorical renderings of the border as points of departure. They contrast sharply with those who see it as a site of violent subjugation and oppression. Borders are of particular import as border controls and undocumented border crossings have intensified across the globe during the long moment of neoliberal globalization and particularly following 11 September 2001. Many works, of course, draw from both these currents. In this respect, the vast interdisciplinary nature of the scholarship and the heavy influence of intersectionality, or the notion that race, class, and gender intertwine complexly and are mutually reinforcing, render such categorization fraught if not problematic.